ical proposal. Nations grow; they are not manufactured.

Equally static is the proposal for immediate and universal disarmament.
Nations will arm so long as they are afraid and so long as they want
something vital that can be obtained only by warfare. Moreover, there
is no principle to determine the permitted armament of each nation or
to designate the country which shall control the international police
that is to enforce disarmament. An unequal disarmament would be unwise
because it would take from the more pacific and civilised nations the
weapons necessary to restrain unorganised and retrograde peoples. The
fundamental defect of the proposal, however, is that it provides no way
by which one nation, injured by another, can secure redress. If there
is to be neither war nor an effective international regulation, what
limits can a nation set to non-military aggression by its neighbour?[4]

The belief that all wars may be averted by arbitration is equally a
static conception. During the last few decades international
arbitration has settled many controversies, which could not be adjusted
by ordinary diplomatic means. Increasingly cases have been submitted
to arbitral decision. {226} The real questions over which nations
clash, however, are not arbitrable. One cannot arbitrate whether
Russia or Germany should control the Balkans, whether the United States
should admit Japanese immigrants, or whether Alsace should go to France
or Germany, or Trieste to Italy or Austria. Arbitration has the
limitations of judicial processes. It is possible to arbitrate
questions concerning the interpretation of treaties and formal
agreements or the application of recognised principles of international
law, but no nation will arbitrate its right to exist. Moreover, the
very fact that arbitration is a judicial process, based upon precedents
and the assumption of the _status quo_ renders it unacceptable to the
nations which are dissatisfied with present arrangements. The
necessity which knows no law respects no arbitration, and no board of
arbitration, however impartial, could decide that one nation should
have more colonies because she needed them or because she was growing,
while another nation must stand aside because feeble and unprogressive.
It is probably not in the interest of the world that Portugal and
Belgium should retain their colonies in Africa, but on what precedent
could these nations be forced to sell? Questions o